Some history and background on the Gaza
by
yidwithlid
01/25/2008, 3:33 PM #
Nina left out a big part of the story:
Even though
Israel offered the return of territories gained in the 1948 war at the
Rhodes armistice conference of February 1949, the Arab leaders (among
whom there were no representatives from the Arabs of the former
Palestine) rejected Israel’s peace offers, declared jihad, and
condemned the Arab refugees to eternal refugee status, while also
illegally occupying the remaining areas that the United Nations had
envisioned as a Palestinian state—as Arafat himself tells us in his
authorized biography (Alan Hart, Arafat: Terrorist or Peace Maker?). Egypt
herded Palestinian Arabs into refugee camps in its new fiefdom in the
Gaza Strip, assassinated their leaders, and shot anyone who tried to
leave. Jordan illegally annexed the west Bank and maintained martial
law over it for the next nineteen years.
Egypt was
particularly conscious of the threat the Muslim Brotherhood posed to
the westernized and increasingly secularized society it was trying to
build, and both King Farouk and later Gamal Abdel Nasser took brutal
and effective steps to repress the movement. They also made sure that
the 350,000 Palestinians whom the Egyptian army had herded into refugee
camps in Gaza would develop no nationalist sentiments or activism.
Egyptian propaganda worked hard to redirect the Palestinians’
justifiable anti- Egypt sentiments toward an incendiary hatred of
Israel. Its secret police engineered the creation and deployment of the
fedayeen (terrorist infiltrators) movement, which between 1949 and 1956
carried out over nine thousand terror attacks against Israel, killing
more than six hundred Israelis and wounding thousands. These fedayeen
were mostly Arab refugees, trained and armed by Egypt.
As the
conflict with Israel hardened throughout the 1950s, Nasser came to see
that Palestinian nationalism, if carefully manipulated, could be an
asset instead of just a threat and an annoyance. Although the fedayeen
terrorism prompted Israel to invade the Sinai in 1956, the Egyptian
leader saw the value in being able to deploy a force that did his
bidding but was not part of Egypt’s formal military; which could make
tactical strikes and then disappear into the amorphous demography of
the west Bank or the Gaza Strip, giving Egypt plausible deniability for
the mayhem it had created. But Nasser’s ability to support such a
useful terrorist group was limited by the failed economy over which he
presided; and so, in 1964, he was delighted to cooperate with the
Soviet Union in the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization
(PLO). For the full article see The Communist Roots of Palestinian Terror By David Meir-Levi
Today's
news is that Israel is considering abandoning Gaza...what that means is
that Egypt would be responsible for supplying it with food, electric,
etc. Egypt is VERY angry that Israel would even consider doing that. I
say let them have Gaza, they created radicalized it, Let EGYPT reap the
rewards.
